Environmental & Social Justice

Abstract

For decades, families across a swath of southeast Los Angeles County have lived in an environmental disaster zone, their kids playing in yards polluted with brain-damaging lead while they wait on a state agency to remove contaminated soil from thousands of homes. Now, the cleanup faces even greater uncertainty. A bankruptcy plan by Exide Technologies, which operated the now-closed lead-acid battery smelter in Vernon that is blamed for the pollution, would allow the site to be abandoned with the remediation unfinished.

Nigel Golden presented the 2020 Ambrose Jearld Jr. Lecture on Diversity and Inclusion in July. His remarks focused on the importance of addressing the cultural and structural barriers to full participation by marginalized communities in STEM. Golden provided a framework for addressing the systemic issues that may explain and/or address those barriers.

Part of the value of clinic participation is learning how to advocate for a real-life client, as opposed to the hypothetical clients law students deal with in their legal writing courses. But often, clients deviate significantly from our expectations, writes Fellow Candice Youngblood. And while classes on discrimination get us fired up to champion for justice, they cannot flesh out every way justice can manifest for real-life communities.

Fellow Candice Youngblood published a Note in UC Berkeley's Ecology Law Quarterly journal that seeks to paint a picture of what working toward environmental justice should look like.

In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health: Check its temperature. That's what a group of researchers did, and they found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the same ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.

In the midst of the global climate talks last week in Madrid, Spain, climate justice and women’s rights activists introduced a set of collective feminist demands to help advance the Green New Deal, in the US and around the world. At 12pm inside the talks, with an audience of both country delegates and civil society, a broad coalition of activists spoke to the need for feminist climate policy.

Mayor-Elect Justin Elicker Friday tapped a diverse crew of grassroots activists — including a working families legislative leader, an immigrant rights champion, and a school parents organizer — to guide his transition and chart a policy course for the next two years. Elicker introduced the co-chairs and two dozen other members of his newly formed transition team, at a press conference held at his campaign headquarters at 161 Whalley Ave.

Plenty of Atlantans spend time on highways, speeding or inching or swerving along. But many people spend a lot of time near the highways, too: at their homes, schools or workplaces. And that’s not great for their health. So Fellow Christina Fuller, a Georgia State University public health professor, is studying how effectively trees can help filter out some of that pollution.